International Journal of Humanities and Social Science
Vol. 3 No. 2 [Special Issue – January 2013]
The Sensation Mania and the Victorian Psychological Underworld
Prof. Taher Badinjki
Dept. of English Language and Translation
Faculty of Arts
Al-Zaytoonah University
Amman, Jordan
Abstract
This paper reconsiders the emergence and growth of the sensation mania of the 1860s that broke from the
accepted social norms and tried to unearth aspects of criminality and passion beneath the respectable surface. It
addresses some important questions concerning the members of this group, the popularity it achieved, the factors
that helped its emergence, what the ensuing moral panic reveals about the society in which the novels were set,
the impact of this phenomenon on later novels and novelists, and the emergence of the neo-sensational novel in
contemporary literature. Moreover, the paper tries to probe the link between these novels and the Victorian
psychological underworld and the political unconscious of their age. This is done on four interrelated levels: The
gender roles, the legal aspect of the family, the social class and relations between classes and finally. A fourth
and last level deals with „property‟ and its effect on the family.
Keywords: sensation mania, respectable surface, neo-sensational novel, Victorian psychological
underworld, political unconscious, gender roles, legal aspect
Introduction
The sensation novel was a literary genre of fiction that flourished in Britain in the 1860s featuring dramatic
thrilling events. Its plots often revolved around sinister conspiracies, hidden secrets, crimes, and villainous
schemes. It distinguished itself from other contemporary genres by introducing these themes in a genteel
domestic setting. These novels ─ dubbed as fast novels, bigamy novels, or adultery novels ─ took the Victorians
by the throat and became immediate best sellers. The added notoriety derived from reading them served only to
contribute to their popularity, and propelled their sales into millions, and for the first time ever got those above
stairs reading the same stories as their servants.
However, high brow critics writing in academic journals of the day decried the phenomenon and criticized its
practitioners and readers in the harshest terms. The archbishop of York fulminated against them in his sermons;
they spread panic through the pages of The Times; and in a famous review, the Oxford Professor of Philosophy,
Henry Mansel (1863), called them "unspeakably disgusting" with "ravenous appetite for carrion”.
This paper tries to address some important questions concerning the new phenomenon. Who are the members of
this group of writers who started it? How did sensation achieve such an incredible popularity so quickly, and what
are the factors that helped its emergence? What did the ensuing moral panic reveal about the society in which the
novels were set? And in terms of its literary reputation, does this racy genre deserve to languish so far behind
Victorian realism, its more respectable and steadier cousin? And finally, what is the impact of this phenomenon
on later novels and novelists, and the emergence of the neo-sensational novel in contemporary literature?
The term sensation was used, initially by critics at the time and increasingly by readers and some of the writers
themselves. It started with The Woman in White (1860), Mrs Henry Wood's East Lynn (1861), Mary Braddon‟s
Lady Audley's Secret (1862).
12
The Special Issue on Contemporary Research in Behavioral and Social Science
© Centre for Promoting Ideas, USA
In addition to these, the list includes other members of this family of sensation writers like Charles Reade,
George Meredith, Caroline Norton, and one or two of the lesser well-known writers like Susan Warner and
Felicia Skene.
These novels are thought of as sensational partly because they are thrillers, very exciting and they got sensational
subjects matters in them. In her review in Blackwood Magazine, Mrs Margaret Oliphant (1862) described these
novels as “sensation novel” and within a year or two the coinage spread and became an accepted term. Their
emergence coincided with some mid-century key events that led to their popularity such as the repeal of the stamp
duty on paper in 1855 which dramatically increased the circulation of newspapers and generated a larger reading
public for them. Identically, the increase in the numbers of readers was the net outcome of the social revolution
taking place and the increase in population. Other important factors such as the proliferation of circulating
libraries, where "triple-decker" Victorian novels were plentiful and easy to obtain, the tabloid journalism and the
lack of available wholesome recreation that favoured the sensation novel as an inexpensive form of entertainment,
serialized fiction to maintain a stable readership, and notorious public trials, contributed to its emergence.
The term “sensation fiction” started as pejorative and quite soon it ceased to be so. There were many respectable
people who were happy to enjoy reading these novels. The question is what were these writers like Collins and
Miss Braddon doing?
They were combining two things: some exciting and perhaps scandalous or controversial subject matters; some
implicit sexual subjects connected with adultery, unhappy marriages, people cheating on each other, and the form
of it which people criticized or relished peculiarly for being exciting and stimulating. Most of these novels were
published in instalments in magazines. Some of them weekly, some monthly, and Collins took the necessity of
exciting. He said "make them laugh, make them cry, make them wait". 1 He turned these curtain scenes into an
extraordinary art form. Readers can remember probably in the very first section of The Woman in White where
the narrator encounters this mysterious woman on the highroad at midnight and he feels a little tap on his
shoulder, and there is that woman distracted, mysterious does not know her way and he helps direct her, and
strangely she mentions to him in the course of their brief conversation that she has some knowledge of this place
in Cumberland where he is shortly to go as an art teacher, and then she disappears in a coach and two men follow
her and he overhears them asking a policeman if he has seen a woman in white who has escaped from asylum and
that's it, and readers have to wait for a week, and in fact waiting which Collins developed in a sort of
extraordinary exciting art form which, according to Kendrick (1978), made Victorian England line up at the
publisher's to get his next installment -- and sing "The Woman in White Waltz," and wear 'Woman in White'
perfume, and bring out the first printing of that book in a day. It has not been out of print since, and has been
turned into a play and a handful of movies.
Similarly, East Lynn has its sensational impact because whereas most of sensation novels were concerned with
bigamy, East Lynn is concerned with adultery. It is a novel about Lady Isabel Carlyle, a beautiful and refined
young woman who leaves her husband whom she suspects of adultery and elopes with Captain Levison. After he
deserts her, she returns to England and finds her husband has remarried. She cannot bear to be away from her
family, so dons a disguise and takes the position of governess in the household of her former husband and his new
wife. When her young son, Willie, dies she is unable to comfort him as she would like, and she too dies.
In Lady Audely's Secret, Braddon's bigamous heroine deserts her child, pushes husband number one down a well,
thinks about poisoning husband number two and sets fire to a hotel in which her other male acquaintances are
residing.
What is really new about sensation fiction is that it took these features from the gothic, from penny dreadful, from
new novels of mystery and crime. It took those issues and brought them home. It brought these things into the
lives of suburban villas, in respectable middle-class lives. That was new and that was what made the sensation for
those who were first reading them in the early1860s, so exciting, so disturbing, and so useful to them as a way of
exploring anxiety, preoccupations, and the inclinations of their minds.
13
International Journal of Humanities and Social Science
Vol. 3 No. 2 [Special Issue – January 2013]
What is also new about these novels is the fact that they were read by people upstairs and downstairs. Different
social classes which seemed very settled almost very fixed in their boundaries started to seem much less settled,
that those people in the upper middle class, indeed the aristocracy, famously the Prince of Wales, was a huge fan
of East Lynn, and Prime Minister William Gladstone had the same interests and the same appetite as those who
were preparing dinner for the Prince of Wales. The success of these novels was so strong that serious and realistic
fiction of the time like Silas Marner and Middlemarch had suggestions of the sensation phenomenon.
In their treatment of adultery, bigamy, secrecy, murder and madness these novels expose the social instability of
the period. They reflect this question of things not being what they seem. You can't trust appearances and this
reflects anxiety about uncertainties within the social structure. They also offer the novelists who are exploring
these issues the opportunity of watching and looking and detecting. These are novels that are deeply interested in
examination of what might look respectable, might look happy but it isn't. You need to look beneath the surface in
these novels, and the readers are recruited alongside the characters as detectives. What makes these novels
valuable to students and readers in literary circles and seminars, is that in reading them we feel as if we are
discovering something about the Victorians which surprises us and reflects our own preconceptions.
It is worth asking here how seriously did the Victorians take these novels? In answering this question we can say
that the Victorians did take them seriously in moral terms. They were seen as moral touchstones and there was a
lot of outrage about what these novels were doing. But they were also taken seriously in underground aesthetic
debate. There were numerous reviews of these novels which say that they are good stories and the reviewers had
no objection to reading them. A review in All the Year Round called The Sensational William (1864), wondered
“Why is it necessarily immoral to shadow forth the awful visitations of wrath and evil and punishment, or to
depict those wonderful and unwonted accidents of fortune which are just as real as anything”, and answers his
fellow writers and conservative readers who waged their campaign against these novels “It is very easy to cry
“Sensational!" but the word proves nothing. Let it be granted that such things are sensational; but then life itself Is
similarly sensational in many of its aspects, and Nature is similarly sensational in many of her forms, and art is
always sensational” and he concludes with the serious claim that that what the sensation novel was doing was
really rather what Sophocles and Shakespeare were doing, dealing with extreme emotions, with passion, dealing
with it in a compelling way:
“The (Edipus of Sophocles is in the highest degree sensational; so are half the plays of Shakespeare, at a moderate
computation; so is the Satan of Paradise Lost; so is Raphael s Massacre of the Innocents; so is the Laocoon; so,
one may say, are the Oratorios of Handel, since they deal with tremendous elements of suffering and wonderment,
of aspiration and triumph. Whenever humanity wrestles with the gods of passion and pain, there, of necessity, is
that departure from our diurnal platitudes which the cant of existing criticism denounces by this single word”. (p.
14).
They are the same, and according to him, the only difference, is that this is done in modern society.
With Freud looming in the view, the question is, does he have a place in this discussion? There has been a
tremendous tendency among critics and students to find in these novels a kind of Victorian psychological
underworld. They argue that what people get out of reading these novels has something to do with the Victorian
psychological underworld. If we take Freud in the vocabulary, what we discover is the repressed release; that
repressed energy which lies beneath that respectability that we might expect.
On another level, these novels tell us as much about the political unconscious of the Victorian age. They register
all sorts of concern about social and cultural change, about social mobility, and about the most central
contemporary social tensions and anxieties of the Victorian middle-class. In the 1850s and the 1860s there was a
lot of agitation, a lot of feminist agitation about the marriage laws, about the women's rights within marriage,
about the rights of women in relation to custody of their children and many of these novels dealt overtly and
directly with these situations. A fair number, if not all, revolved around the cornerstone of Victorian society,
namely the family.
This is done on four interrelated levels. The first level is concerned with gender roles, marriage, and the role of
the woman in the family.
14
The Special Issue on Contemporary Research in Behavioral and Social Science
© Centre for Promoting Ideas, USA
There is a lot of discontented women who do not fit into conventional marriage easily, and young men who do not
seem to know what their proper social role is, and the plots of these novels often embed the young man more
securely in middle class society by the end. The second level is involved with the legal aspect of the family and
the role of the law in regulating and organizing the Victorian family. A third level looks at social class and
relations between classes. A fourth and last level deals with „property‟ and its effect on the family. On each of
these levels, the family is debunked as an “illusory sanctuary” (Pykett: 1994). As such, the Sensation Novel can
be seen as an intervention in contemporary social. Focusing on how these novels reflect Victorian thought and
social change, modern critics have resurrected the sensation novel and reinstated it as a valuable part of literary
history.
Although the form is often spoken of as a phenomenon of two decades it remained vibrant throughout the rest of
the century, and well into the next one. Its influences may well be detected in works written after 1880, including
the novels of Thomas Hardy whose first effort, Desperate Remedies is very much in the Sensation vein. Modern
critics like Walter M. Kendrick sees The woman in White as “more than a historical artifact or a primitive
precursor of Agatha Christie” It is very much “concerned with the problems of plot and character, form and
imitation, artifice and authenticity, which occupied the debate over literary sensationalism” (Kendrick, 1978).
While Kelly Marsh tends to believe that the Victorian sensation novel has re-emerged on the scene of
contemporary British fiction. The neo-sensation novel uses the conventions, themes, and even the agenda of the
Victorian sensation novel (Marsh, 1995). Between the Victorian version and the contemporary version lies a
transition period exemplified by the works of Thomas Hardy and George Gissing.
References
Anonymous. (1864). The Sensational Williams. All the Year Round, 13 Feb, 14-17.
Kendrick, Walter M. (1977-78). The Sensationalism of The Woman in White. NCF, 32, 218-35.
Mansel, H. L. (1863). Sensation Novels. Quarterly Review, 133, 481-514.
Marsh, Kelly A. (1863). The Neo-Sensation Novel: A Contemporary Genre in the Victorian Tradition. Philogical
Quarterly, 74.1, 99-123.
Oliphant, M. (1862). Sensation Novels. Blackwood Magazine, 19, 464-84.
Pykett, Lyn. (1994). The Sensation Novel: From The Woman in White to The Monstone. London: Northcote
House Publishers, p.12.
Endnotes
-----------------------1. 'Make 'em cry, make 'em laugh, make 'em wait' . This adage is widely attributed to Collins (though
sometimes also to Dickens) there is no evidence he ever wrote this phrase down. It is not in any of his
published writings and nor is it in any of his known letters. He may have said it, but my recollection is that it
first appeared attributed to him long after his death.
15